Recently in Performances

It might seem churlish to complain about the BBC Proms coverage of Pierre
Boulez’s 90th anniversary. After all, there are a few performances
dotted around — although some seem rather oddly programmed, as if embarrassed
at the presence of new or newish music. (That could certainly not be claimed in
the present case.)

I recently spent four days in St. Petersburg, timed to coincide with the
annual Stars of the White Nights Festival. Yet the most memorable singing I
heard was neither at the Mariinsky Theater nor any other performance hall. It
was in the small, nearly empty church built for the last Tsar, Nicholas II, at
Tsarskoye Selo.

As I walked up Exhibition Road on my way to the Royal Albert Hall, I passed a busking tuba player whose fairground ditties were enlivened by bursts of flame which shot skyward from the bell of his instrument, to the amusement and bemusement of a rapidly gathering pavement audience.

‘Here, thanks be to God, my opera is praised to the skies and there is nothing in it which does not please greatly.’ So wrote Antonio Vivaldi to Marchese Guido Bentivoglio d’Aragona in Ferrara in 1737.

When he was skilfully negotiating the not inconsiderable complexities,
upheavals and strife of musical and religious life at the English royal court
during the Reformation, Thomas Tallis (c.1505-85) could hardly have imagined
that more than 450 years later people would be queuing round the block for the
opportunity spend their lunch-hour listening to the music that he composed in
service of his God and his monarch.

Two of the important late twentieth century stage directors, Robert Carsen and Peter Sellars, returned to the Aix Festival this summer. Carsen’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a masterpiece, Sellars’ strange Tchaikovsky/Stravinsky double bill is simply bizarre.

Plus an evening by the superb Modigliani Quartet that complimented the brief (55 minutes) a cappella opera for six female voices Svadba (2013) by Serbian composer Ana Sokolovic (b. 1968). She lives in Canada.

With its revelatory production of Rappaccini’s Daughter performed outdoors in the city’s refurbished Botanical Gardens, Des Moines Metro Opera has unlocked the gate to a mysterious, challenging landscape of musical delights.

Even by Shakespeare’s standards A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of his earlier plays, boasts a particularly fantastical plot involving a bunch of aristocrats (the Athenian Court of Theseus), feuding gods and goddesses (Oberon and Titania), ‘Rude Mechanicals’ (Bottom, Quince et al) and assorted faeries and spirits (such as Puck).

What do we call Tristan und Isolde? That may seem a silly question.
Tristan und Isolde, surely, and Tristan for short, although
already we come to the exquisite difficulty, as Tristan and Isolde themselves partly seem (though do they only seem?) to recognise of that celebrated ‘und’.

So this was it, the Pelléas which had apparently repelled critics and other members of the audience on the opening night. Perhaps that had been exaggeration; I avoided reading anything substantive — and still have yet to do so.

Performances

06 Jul 2014

Lucy Crowe, Wigmore Hall

The programme declared that ‘music, water and night’ was the connecting thread running through this diverse collection of songs, performed by soprano Lucy Crowe and pianist Anna Tilbrook, but in fact there was little need to seek a unifying element for these eclectic works allowed Crowe to demonstrate her expressive range — and offered the audience the opportunity to hear some interesting rarities.

Sibelius’ musical responses to the Finnish folk legend Kalevala
are diverse in idiom and form, and they were pivotal in the development of the
composer’s musical language and identity. Kullervo (a symphonic poem
for soprano, baritone, chorus and orchestra) and the orchestral suite,
Lemminkäinen (which includes the ever-popular The Swan of
Tuonela are well-known, but few will be familiar with Luonnotar
(1913), a tone poem for soprano and orchestra, which the Sibelius arranged
for voice and piano in 1915. Luonnotar is the Spirit of Nature and Mother of
the Seas and the text, from the first part of the Kalevala, tells of
the creation of the world and the oceans.

Tilbrook’s quiet, rapid oscillations opened the work, creating an air of
anticipation suggestive of a tense, poised moment before creation, as
Luonnotar, the ‘maiden of the air’, floats alone in the ‘vast plains of
the sky’. Crowe’s first entry lies low in the voice, but it was rich and
strong, rising powerfully and with clarity, supported by simple,
middle-register held chords; it was an ancient incantation, an expression of
the goddess’s loneliness as she soars aloft. Luonnotar then descends into the
fertile sea and — exploiting the open vowel sounds of the Finnish text, which
she articulated convincingly — Crowe’s arcing, yearning lines were
paradoxically both achingly beautifully and laden with anxiety as Luonnotar
drifts in the turbulent waters, the latter evoked by Tilbrook’s sensitively
graded rippling accompaniment.

Crowe mastered the fiendishly difficult, often very suddent, changes of
register and, pronouncing the mythical spirit’s words of self-pity and fear,
she whispered the eerily sighing vocal line with absolutely true intonation,
the wide gap between the climbing soprano line and Tilbrook’s dark resonant
bass intimating her alienation and despair. The hushed tremblings of the
subsequent piano interlude were wonderfully controlled and veiled, before the
re-entry of the voice initiated a sense of release: a bird appears, seeking the
shores upon which to build its nest, and Crowe’s expansive line seemed
suspended in the air as it built to the bird’s climactic other-worldly cries,
‘Ei! Ei!’ (No! No!), expressing the bird’s distress and exhaustion.
Crowe’s breath control was incredibly impressive as she maintained a focused
tone while grading the dynamic peaks and lows with sensitivity and skill.

After an astonishingly tumultuous piano commentary, the ensuing calm was
deeply poignant: the Water Mother lifts her knee from the seas, upon which the
bird can make its nest. Crowe’s variant of the lyrical phrases which had
previously depicted Luonnotar’s regrets now assumed a more mysterious air,
Tilbrook’s low fifths quietly but sonorously echoing far below. When the nest
falls into the waters and the egg is broken into fragments, the essence of the
sky and firmaments are released, and here the performers retreated almost to
nothing, creating an ethereal tranquillity, Tilbrook’s ever-widening
tessitura conjuring the limitless cosmos as Crowe’s final melody climbed with
the crystalline exquisiteness of a star in the sky: a mystical close, but one
whose sense of scarcely comprehensible vastness was also suggestive of the
bleak horrors of the First World War.

Despite the enormous stamina demanded by Sibelius’s epic chronicle, Crowe
had plenty in reserve for Berg’s Sieben Frühe Lieder which
followed. Written in 1905-08, when the composer was still under the tutelage of
Arnold Schönberg, the songs look back to the late Romantic musical worlds of
Strauss, Mahler and Wolf, sideways to the compositional rigour of his teacher
and at times — as in the whole-tone scales of the first song, ‘Nacht’ —
to the harmonic palette of Debussy, and forwards to the expressive richness of
Berg’s own later writing for the voice. ‘Die Nachtigall’ (The
Nightingale, a setting of Theodor Storm) was powerfully direct, Crowe’s
ecstatic exclamation, ‘Die Rosen aufgesprungen’ (The roses have sprung up)
an outpouring of optimistic fervour.

‘Schilflied’ (Reed song) was wonderfully lyrica:,’ Crowe’s account
of a lover’s journey along a secret forest path whose reedy borders symbolise
the traveller’s inner emotions — passion and despair — was imbued with
Romantic longing. The broad melodic gestures of ‘Traumgekrönt (Crowned with
dreams) were confident and exuberant, while ‘Im Zimmer’ (In this room)
demonstrated a more focused approach to the nuances of the text. The affecting
harmonic nuances, and the voice’s semitonal fall, in the closing phrase of
‘Liebesode’ (Ode to love) wonderfully captured the indissoluble blend of
Romantic joy and suffering. ‘Sommertage’ (Summer days) shone with gleaming
brightness.

Throughout, Tilbrook was a communicative, thoughtful accompanist. The dark
postlude to ‘Nacht’ was a portentous representation of the singer’s
closing admonition, ‘O gib acht!’ (O take heed!), as the stars shine in the
silent night above the gloom of the deep valley. In ‘Die Nachtigall’, the
gentle, staccato syncopations in the central section of the song injection a
subtle tension which propelled the music forward. Overall, a spirit of elation
tinged with wistfulness was perfectly sustained throughout the sequence.

European Romanticism was superseded by the English folk tradition in the
second half of the recital. First came four songs by Michael Head. The
performers brought discerning drama to ‘Nocturne’, from the recitative-like
opening, depicting the solitude of the moonlit scene, to the more urgent
anguish of the abandoned lover’s recollections of love in the central verse.
The much-loved ‘The ships of Arcady’ was serene, Crowe’s melody conveying
the onlooker’s nostalgia for his vision of the passing ship, while
‘Beloved’ was a more impassioned representation of music’s erotic power.

Traditional folk songs, arranged variously by Britten and Phyllis Tate,
highlighted the sweet purity of Crowe’s soprano, but also the intelligent way
that she uses the voice to communicate an expressive narrative — the
unaccompanied Irish ballad, ‘She moved thro’ the fair’, was particularly
engaging. United by their repeated searches for lost love amid a natural world
whose birds, flowers and fauna simultaneously embody, salve and agitate the
singer’s emotions, these songs revisited — though in less anguished form
— the Romantic vistas of the first half of the evening. In particular, the
simple canon of ‘The ash grove’ was almost Schubertian, and while Crowe’s
beautiful melody in ‘The Salley Gardens’ evoked a simpler mood, depth was
added by Tilbrook’s attentiveness to the harmonic complexities of the
accompaniment; the final lines, ‘But I was young and foolish/ And now am full
of tears’ were discreetly moving. Much technical skill and vocal control is
required to make these songs so effortlessly appealing and enthralling.

Walton’s virtuosic song-cycle A song for the Lord Mayor’s Table
brought the concert to a rousing and impressive conclusion. Commissioned by the
Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths for the Festival of the City of London in
1962, the songs encapsulate the striking, absorbing juxtapositions of London
life, presenting resounding church bells and street cries. Crowe sang with
commanding vitality, injecting energy into the vocal lines, the tone lustrous
and the intonation well-centred. The entrancing melody of ‘Glide Gently’, a
setting of Wordsworth, was utterly beguiling and the concluding song, ‘Gay go
up and gay go down’ (Text: anon.) particularly lovely.

There was much to admire and enjoy in this recital. However, the opening
four songs by Schubert were disappointing; Crowe did not seem comfortable with
the idiom and her tone was somewhat withdrawn. While Tilbrook’s introduction
to ‘Der Fluss’ (The river) was eloquent and the accompaniment full of
diverse colours, Crowe’s melody was rather unobtrusive; ‘Auf dem Wasser zu
singen’ (To be sung on the water) was similarly unfocused, although there
were some judicious expressive rubatos. ‘Am den Mond’ (To the moon) found
the soprano in brighter voice, and in ‘Nacht und Träume’ (Night and
dreams) Crowe’s characteristic elegant lyricism was evident in the delicately
articulated opening phrase, ‘Heil’ge Nacht, du sinkest nieder’ (Holy
night, you float down). Sadly, in general in these lieder consonants were
barely audible and vowels inaccurately shaped. Thankfully, Crowe quickly got
into her stride, and we enjoyed an unusually diverse programme, communicated
with directness and passion, concluding with a relaxed encore,
‘Summertime’.